[Graeme]

Feeding the World in a Changing Climate

The statistics regarding the production and subsequent consumption of food on our planet are staggering. With climate change affecting ecosystems the world over, including already-stressed regions, food security is a problem that is not going to go away anytime soon. On Wednesday, an independent commission of scientific leaders taken from 13 countries released a number of recommendations to policy makers on how to achieve food security in the face of climate change.
According to the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change, there are nearly one billion undernourished on our planet, and millions who suffer from chronic disease due to excess food consumption.
The demand for food continues to grow as populations continue to grow, and food prices grow with them. But despite all of this, approximately one-third of food produced for humans is lost or wasted.
On top of this, climate change threatens more and more droughts, flooding, and outbreaks of pests at the same time as we clear 12 million hectares of agricultural land through land degradation and deforestation.


The Commission outlined seven recommendations that are designed to be implemented by a combination of governments, international institutions, investors, agricultural producers, consumers, food companies, and researchers. Those 7 recommendations are:

Integrate food security and sustainable agriculture into global and national policies

Significantly raise the level of global investment in sustainable agriculture and food systems in the next decade

Sustainably intensify agricultural production while reducing GhG emissions and other negative environmental impacts of agriculture

Develop specific programmes and policies to assist populations and sectors that are most vulnerable to climate changes and food insecurity

Reshape food access and consumption patterns to ensure basic nutritional needs are met and to foster healthy and sustainable eating patterns worldwide

Reduce loss and waste in food systems, targeting infrastructure, farming practices, processing, distribution and household habits

Create comprehensive, shared, integrated information systems that encompass human and ecological dimensions.

The full report, Achieving food security in the face of climate change, is available in PDF format

cleantechnica

[dohboi]

If it were completely honest, the name of the report should have been:

"The impossibility of achieving food security in the face of climate change"

Even models that don't include carbon feedbacks are now talking about three degrees C of warming by mid century. You lose at least ten percent of your agricultural yield globally for every degree of GW. That means about a third less land to feed about a third more people. And of course once you factor in carbon feedbacks, you can probably double that at least to two third smaller yield.

Then you have to figure in PO reducing your ability to use fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, tractors, combines...Getting crops out of the field and into the market will become an ever greater challenge. Processing becomes more difficult. Recall also that basic fertilizers like potassium are running low.

[Lore]

Then you have to figure in PO reducing your ability to use fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, tractors, combines...Getting crops out of the field and into the market will become an ever greater challenge. Processing becomes more difficult. Recall also that basic fertilizers like potassium are running low.

By some estimates only about 10 years left of phosphate as well and then you have that little problem with the vanishing insect pollinators and global fish depletion.

[ritter]

Gosh, you guys are so optimistic today!

[AgentR11]

Needz Mor Zomby

[dohboi]

http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2012/03/scientists-warn-of-emergency-on-global.html

Scientists warn of ‘emergency on global scale’

Leading scientists on Thursday called on the upcoming Rio Summit to grapple with environmental ills that they said pointed to "a humanitarian emergency on a global scale."

In a "State of the Planet" declaration issued after a four-day conference, the scientists said Earth was now facing unprecedented challenges, from water stress, pollution, and species loss to spiralling demands for food.

They called on the June 20-22 followup to the 1992 Earth Summit to overhaul governance of the environment and sweep away a fixation with GDP as the sole barometer of wellbeing.

"The continuing function of the Earth system as it has supported the wellbeing of human civilisation in recent centuries is at risk,"

[Graeme]

Sustainably Feeding a Changing World

One of the biggest challenges facing this planet isn’t simply feeding a growing population — perhaps as many as 10 billion by the year 2100. The challenge is feeding all those people as the climate changes in ways we can barely project. A new report called “Achieving Food Security in the Face of Climate Change” illustrates the complexity of the problem and makes clear that action must be taken soon to address it.

Commissioned by Cgiar — a research alliance financed by the United Nations and the World Bank — it recommends essential changes in the way we think about farming, food and equitable access to it, and the way these things affect climate change.

It is tempting to assume that expanding agricultural acreage and using new technology, like genetically engineered crops, will somehow save the day. The report says that efficiency and sustainability will also require fundamental changes in how we grow and consume food: reducing waste in production and distribution and finding ways to farm that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and other “negative environmental impacts of agriculture,” like soil loss and water pollution. The report also calls for better dietary habits in wealthy countries, which have a disproportionately and unsustainably high calorie intake, and targeted aid to populations whose farming is most at risk.

These are complex goals that require a new vision of how we farm and how we eat, a vision of how to take better care of this planet’s biological resources and live equitably within our planetary means.

nytimes

[Graeme]

Climate Change and the Food Supply

A small bit of good news about food prices from the Food and Agriculture Organization, a United Nations agency in Rome: The price spiral seen earlier this summer as markets reacted to droughts and other bad news has leveled off, with the agency’s closely watched index of global food prices essentially unchanged in August compared with July.

Prices are still up sharply from earlier in the year and remain high by historical standards, the F.A.O. said Thursday, but they have not reached the peaks seen in 2008 and 2011. The agency held out hope that a third global food crisis in five years might yet be averted.


Perhaps the biggest single question about climate change is whether people will have enough to eat in coming decades.

We have had two huge spikes in global food prices in five years that were driven largely by chaotic weather. And this year we may be in the early stages of a third big jump. Droughts and heat waves have damaged crops in many producing countries this year, including the United States and India.

As my colleague Annie Lowrey reported this week, United Nations agencies are hitting the alarm button.

Now come two reports that help to frame the problem of the future food supply — one of them offering a stark warning about what could be in store, the other offering a possible way out.

nytimes

[Graeme]

This article was posted on the front page and should be posted here too:

We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say

What’s the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many—poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, etc—but the big one is more primal than any of the above. It’s hunger, plain and simple. If there’s a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense.

In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.

The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.” Plot the data, and it looks like this:

What’s the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many—poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, etc—but the big one is more primal than any of the above. It’s hunger, plain and simple. If there’s a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense.

In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.

The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.” Plot the data, and it looks like this:

What’s the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many—poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, etc—but the big one is more primal than any of the above. It’s hunger, plain and simple. If there’s a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense.

In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.

The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.” Plot the data, and it looks like this:

motherboard

[Whitefang]

Ok Greame, indeed the right place for this post........deadline coming up for all of us......a year is awfully close from now.

[Whitefang]

Hey, if you want to make fast money: a whopping 8000 bucks that can solve you're energy needs prepping for hell and beyond.

http://www.nature.com/openinnovation?ch ... Id=9933146

What are the technical revolutions that agriculture needs to undergo in the next 20-35 years so the global population can be fed?
You don’t need to describe the solution, but you do need to describe the unmet need and give some background to justify that need. The most novel and insightful ideas will be awarded.

This is an Ideation Challenge with a guaranteed award for at least one submitted solution.

Ideation challenge?
These nature people are just asking to get robbed, asking 30 bucks for reading an article and over 200 for a year reading.
Deadline is 27th this month............just paste/copy from this forum should do the trick...hihi

[Graeme]

ood and Climate: A New Warning

Their paper was released over the weekend in the journal Nature Climate Change. (A summary is here, the full paper is here for those with access to the journal, and the associated news release is here.) If growing practices and rice varieties remained the same, they found, rising carbon dioxide levels would not entirely offset the effects of heat -– and would, moreover, contribute to increased releases of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from rice paddies.

The study found that rice yields would likely fall by a third by the end of the century, while methane emissions from rice cultivation would jump 58 percent. Put those factors together and, for a given level of output, greenhouse gas emissions from rice production would more than double, the study found.

“Our results show that rice agriculture becomes less climate-friendly as our atmosphere continues to change,” Dr. van Groenigen said in a statement. “This is important because rice paddies are one of the largest human sources of methane and rice is the world’s second-most produced staple crop.”

The study emphasized, however, that these outcomes are not inevitable; they are merely possible if sufficient effort isn’t put into countering the problems. The study cited the critical importance of adjusting farmer practices to lower methane emissions (draining paddies mid-season can have a big effect, for instance) and of finding new rice varieties that can stand up to rising temperatures in the important growing regions.

nytimes

[Graeme]

Growing food in the desert: is this the solution to the world's food crisis?

The scrubby desert outside Port Augusta, three hours from Adelaide, is not the kind of countryside you see in Australian tourist brochures. The backdrop to an area of coal-fired power stations, lead smelting and mining, the coastal landscape is spiked with saltbush that can live on a trickle of brackish seawater seeping up through the arid soil. Poisonous king brown snakes, redback spiders, the odd kangaroo and emu are seen occasionally, flies constantly. When the local landowners who graze a few sheep here get a chance to sell some of this crummy real estate they jump at it, even for bottom dollar, because the only real natural resource in these parts is sunshine.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that a group of young brains from Europe, Asia and north America, led by a 33-year-old German former Goldman Sachs banker but inspired by a London theatre lighting engineer of 62, have bought a sizeable lump of this unpromising outback territory and built on it an experimental greenhouse which holds the seemingly realistic promise of solving the world's food problems.

Indeed, the work that Sundrop Farms, as they call themselves, are doing in South Australia, and just starting up in Qatar, is beyond the experimental stage. They appear to have pulled off the ultimate something-from-nothing agricultural feat – using the sun to desalinate seawater for irrigation and to heat and cool greenhouses as required, and thence cheaply grow high-quality, pesticide-free vegetables year-round in commercial quantities.

So far, the company has grown tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers by the tonne, but the same, proven technology is now almost ready to be extended to magic out, as if from thin air, unlimited quantities of many more crops – and even protein foods such as fish and chicken – but still using no fresh water and close to zero fossil fuels. Salty seawater, it hardly needs explaining, is free in every way and abundant – rather too abundant these days, as our ice caps melt away.

guardian

[Shaved Monkey]

What are their inputs and where is their market?
Seems to need a fair bit of infrastructure to set up,then you would need to import fertiliser and export products..... which require fuel.
To scale it down for small localised markets would be great as it reduces export costs but doesnt solve the fertiliser input problems.

[Tanada]

What are their inputs and where is their market?
Seems to need a fair bit of infrastructure to set up,then you would need to import fertiliser and export products..... which require fuel.
To scale it down for small localised markets would be great as it reduces export costs but doesnt solve the fertiliser input problems.

You build your greenhouse complex on a rail line and use rail transport to haul waste 'fertilizer' in and useful produce out.

[Shaved Monkey]

In a post PO economy it would rely on the price of "waste fertiliser" in a market were regular fossil fuel derived fertiliser was no longer viable,putting pressure on alternatives.
Is "waste fertiliser" not factory hen poo or feedlot cattle/dairy poo or fish waste or human waste all of which are reliant on cheap oil.

As a system that just generated water for small scale in ground organic farming it would be ideal in isolated coastal low rainfall areas, as the inputs reduce but could your outputs justify the investment?
and what happens to the excess salts?

[dohboi]

"what happens to the excess salts"

Another good reason for low salt diets!

Really, I've thought about this a good bit, and it is even more important to have low salt diets if you are using your effluents on the land than just to watch your blood pressure.

When we start thinking of our bodies as temporary reservoirs of nutrients--nutrients that ultimately belong to our kids and the planet--we start prioritizing things a bit differently. Another place that this has come home to me recently is an issue that came up in an environmental advisory group to the city council: It turns out that a not-insignificant local source of atmospheric mercury is crematoria. Mercury composites used in dentistry--designed otherwise to be quite stable and safe--when burned at the high temperatures in the crematoria, become dangerous gaseous forms of the heavy metal.

But who thinks about the effect may eventually be on the environment of what they put in their teeth today? Few to none, apparently.

An even deeper symptom of our eco-insanity than what many see as the obvious environmental problems is this fundamental disconnection we feel between our bodies and the world.

[AgentR11]

Quick note on salt, that I didn't know about until a few months ago. There *IS* a potassium chloride salt available in grocery stores. As the most important thing about salt in your body is the balance between K & Na, deleting some Na and adding K at the same time, easy win. It sprinkles a bit differently, but at least to me it tastes pretty much the same.

Teeth wise... you can get ceramic'ish fillings instead of silver/mercury. I don't know if they're actually better for the environment or not though.

As to disconnectedness? Get out there and sweat and bleed some. Works like a champ.

[Graeme]

The Green Revolution Is Wilting

The Green Revolution has stagnated for key food crops in many regions of the world, according to a study published in the Dec. 18 issue of Nature Communications by scientists with the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment and McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Led by IonE research fellow Deepak Ray, the study team developed geographically detailed maps of annual crop harvested areas and yields of maize (corn), rice, wheat and soybeans from 1961 to 2008. It found that although virtually all regions showed a yield increase sometime during that period, in 24 to 39 percent of the harvested areas (depending on the crop) yield plateaued or outright declined in recent years. Among the top crop-producing nations, vast areas of two of the most populous -- China and India -- are witnessing especially concerning stagnation or decline in yield.


Interestingly, the researchers found that yields of wheat and rice -- two crops that are largely used as food crops, and which supply roughly half of the world's dietary calories -- are declining across a higher percentage of cropland than those of corn and soybean, which are used largely to produce meat or biofuels.
"This finding is particularly troubling because it suggests that we have preferentially focused our crop improvement efforts on feeding animals and cars, as we have largely ignored investments in wheat and rice, crops that feed people and are the basis of food security in much of the world," said study co-author and IonE director Jonathan Foley, professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in the College of Biological Sciences.

sciencedaily